Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday January 10, 2011 @03:28PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.

FrederickSeiler writes "When David Harriman, this book's author, was studying physics at Berkeley, he
noticed an interesting contrast: 'In my physics lab course, I learned how to determine the
atomic structure of crystals by means of x-ray diffraction and how to identify
subatomic particles by analyzing bubble-chamber photographs. In
my philosophy of science course, on the other hand, I was taught by a
world-renowned professor (Paul Feyerabend)
that there is no such thing as scientific method and that physicists have no
better claim to knowledge than voodoo priests.
I knew little about epistemology [the philosophy of
knowledge] at the time, but I could not help noticing that it was the
physicists, not the voodoo priests, who had made possible the life-promoting
technology we enjoy today.' Harriman noticed the enormous gulf between science as it is successfully
practiced and science as is it described by post-Kantian philosophers such as Feyerabend,
who are totally unable to explain the spectacular achievements of modern
science." Read on for the rest of Frederick's review.

The Logical Leap: Induction In Physics

author

David Harriman

pages

272

publisher

NAL Trade

rating

9/10

reviewer

Frederick Seiler

ISBN

0451230051

summary

Explains how scientists discover the laws of nature

Logical Leap: Induction in Physics
attempts to bridge this gap between philosophy
and science by providing a philosophical explanation of how scientists actually
discover things. A physicist and physics teacher by trade, he worked with
philosopher Leonard Peikoff to understand the process
of induction in physics, and this book is a result of their collaboration.

Induction is one of the two types of logical argument; the
other type is deduction. First described by Aristotle, deduction covers
arguments like the following: (1) All men are mortal. (2)
Socrates is a man. (3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Deductive arguments start
with generalizations ("All men are mortal.") and apply them to specific
instances ("Socrates"). Deductive logic is well understood, but it relies on
the truth of the generalizations in order to yield true conclusions.

So how do we make the correct generalizations? This is the
subject of the other branch of logic induction and it is obviously
much more difficult than deduction. How can we ever be justified in reasoning
from a limited number of observations to a sweeping statement that refers to an
unlimited number of objects? In answering this question Harriman presents an
original theory of induction, and he shows how it is supported by key
developments in the history of physics.

The first chapter presents the philosophical foundations of
the theory, which builds directly on the theory of concepts developed by
Ayn Rand. Unfortunately for the general reader, Harriman
assumes familiarity with Rand's theory of knowledge, including her views of concepts
as open-ended, knowledge as hierarchical, certainty as contextual, perceptions
as self-evident, and arbitrary ideas as invalid. Those unfamiliar with these
ideas may find this section to be confusing. But the good news is that those
readers can then proceed to the following chapters, which flesh out the theory
and show how it applies to key developments in the history of physics (and the
related fields of astronomy and chemistry).
These chapters do a wonderful job at bringing together the
physics and the philosophy, clarifying both in the process.

Harriman argues that as concepts form a hierarchy, generalizations
form a hierarchy as well; more abstract generalizations rest on simpler, more
direct ones, relying ultimately on a rock-solid base of "first-level"
generalizations which are directly, perceptually obvious, such as the toddler's
grasp of the fact that "pushed balls roll." First-level
generalizations are formed from our direct experiences, in which the open-ended nature of
concepts leads to generalizations. Higher-level
generalizations are formed based on lower-level ones, using Mill's Methods of
Agreement and Difference to identify causal connections,
while taking into account the entirety of one's context of knowledge.

Ayn Rand held that because of the
hierarchical nature of our knowledge, it is possible to take any valid idea (no
matter how advanced), and identify its hierarchical roots, i.e. the more
primitive, lower-level ideas on which it rests, tracing these ideas all the way
back to directly observable phenomena. Rand used the word "reduction" to refer
to this process. In a particularly interesting discussion, Harriman shows how the
process of reduction can be applied to the idea that "light travels in straight
lines," identifying such earlier ideas as the concept "shadow" and finally the
first-level generalization "walls resist hammering hands."

Harriman's discussion of the experimental method starts with
a description of Galileo's experiments with pendulums. Galileo initially
noticed that the period of a pendulum's swing seems to be the same for
different swing amplitudes, so he decided to accurately measure this time
period to see if it is really true. Concluding that the period is indeed
constant, he then did further experiments. He selectively varied the weight and
material of the pendulum's bob, and the length of the pendulum. This led him to
the discovery that a pendulum's length is proportional to the square of its
period. Harriman notes the experiments that Galileo did
not perform: 'He saw no need to vary every known property of the pendulum
and look for a possible effect on the period. For example, he did not
systematically vary the color, temperature, or smell of the pendulum bob; he
did not investigate whether it made a difference if the pendulum arm is made of
cotton twine or silk thread. Based on everyday observation, he had a vast
pre-scientific context of knowledge that was sufficient to
eliminate such factors as irrelevant. To call such knowledge "pre-scientific"
is not to cast doubt on its objectivity;
such lower-level generalizations are acquired by the implicit use of the same
methods that the scientist uses deliberately and systematically, and they are
equally valid.' One powerful tool for avoiding nonproductive speculations in
science is Ayn Rand's concept of the arbitrary, and
Harriman brilliantly clarifies this idea in the section on Newton's optical
experiments. An arbitrary idea is one for which there is no evidence; it is an
idea put forth based solely on whim or faith. Rand held that an arbitrary idea
cannot be valid even as a possibility; in order to say "it is possible," one
needs to have evidence (which can consist of either direct
observations or reasoning based on observations).

Newton began his research on colors with a wide range of
observations, which led him to his famous and brilliant experiments with prisms.
Harriman presents the chain of reasoning and experimentation which
led Newton to conclude that white light consists of a mixture of all of
the colors, which are separated by refraction.

Isaac Newton said that he "framed no hypotheses," and here he
was referring to his rejection of the arbitrary. When Descartes claimed without
any evidence that light consists of rotating particles with the speed of rotation
determining the color; and when Robert Hooke claimed without any
evidence that white light consists of a symmetrical wave pulse, which
results in colors when the wave becomes distorted; these ideas were totally
arbitrary, and they deserved to be thrown out without further consideration: "Newton
understood that to accept an arbitrary idea even as a mere possibility
that merits consideration undercuts all of one's knowledge. It is
impossible to establish any truth if one regards as valid the procedure of
manufacturing contrary 'possibilities' out of thin air." This rejection of the
arbitrary may be expressed in a positive form: Scientists should be focused on
reality, and only on reality.

After discussing the rise of experimentation in physics, Harriman
turns to the Copernican revolution, the astronomical discoveries of Galileo and
Kepler, and the grand synthesis of Newton's laws of
motion and of universal gravitation. But this reviewer found the most
historically interesting chapter to be the one about the atomic theory of
matter; this chapter is a cautionary tale about the lack of objective standards
for evaluating theories. This story then leads to Harriman proposing a set of
specific criteria of proof for scientific theories.

The final, concluding chapter addresses several broader
issues, including why mathematics is fundamental to the science of physics, how
the science of philosophy is different than physics, and finally, how modern
physics has gone down the wrong path due to the lack of a proper theory of
induction.

So, with the publication of
Logical Leap, has the age-old "problem of induction" now been
solved? On this issue, the reader must judge for himself. What is clear to this
reviewer is that Harriman has presented an insightful, thought-provoking and
powerful new theory about how scientists discover the laws of nature.

I recall the quote "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornitology is to birds" being attributed to feynman. And i find it all too fitting for any discussion that tries to mix science and philosophy.

While the greek word philosophia literally means "friend of wisdom", the common-day philosopher tends to stare at their naval and wonder if they even exist more than they use anything which might resemble wisdom.

Meanwhile, the engineer is creating ways to save lives, feed millions, and travel to Mars.

I - personally - find it frustrating that we listen to the naval-staring philosopher, and forget what wisdom is in the same moment.

In my philosophy of science course, on the other hand, I was taught by a world-renowned professor (Paul Feyerabend) that there is no such thing as scientific method and that physicists have no better claim to knowledge than voodoo priests

I'd say he's a bit of a silly goose who needs to study the things he is dismantling before making claims against them. While inductive reasoning leaves itself open to be false, and there are times where inductive reasoning has proven to be false, it does not discredit the scientific method anywhere near enough to put it in the same ballpark as religious beliefs.

Like this review and this book no doubt mentions, science is an open process where anybody and everybody can study and contribute. To find a major flaw in the currently accepted and believed theories is considered a scientific breakthrough, not blasphemy or heathen. Given that those who embrace the scientific method are willing to accept criticism and increase their knowledge of the entire system instead of deny or rebel against it, I believe those people have far more claim to knowledge. If you don't believe what a physicist has come up with, just recreate the scenario yourself and see the results. I challenge any priest, voodoo or otherwise, to do the same without the aid of science or mathematics.

Well, actually, Feyerabend does at various equate science to voodoo and other systems of myth. However, the thing is that Feyerabend is not doing this to denigrate science, as the comparison to "voodoo" will be normally read. He in fact explicitly condemns the common practice of referring to "voodoo" as a stand-in for obscurantism and ignorance that can be dismissed out of hand:

Besides, ancient doctrines and "primitive" myths appear strange and nonsensical only because the information they contain is not known, or is distorted by philologists or anthropologists unfamiliar with the simplest physical, medial or astronomical knowledge. Voodoo, Dr Hesse's pièce de resistance, is a case in point. Nobody knows it, everybody uses it as a paradigm of backwardness of confusion. And yet Voodoo has a firm though still not sufficiently understood material basis, and a study of its manifestations can be used to enrich, and perhaps even to revise, our knowledge of physiology. [Against Method, pp. 35-36]

Feyerabend thinks that science and myth are very similar and are of comparable worth. (And note I said comparable, not "equal"; the point is that there are arguments about values that can be had in this regard.)

First of all, despite the popular view of religion you espouse, most religions and religious individuals are open to challenges to their faith. Admittedly this is a matter of degree, but to suggest that religions react to every challenge with "blasphemy!" and "you heathen!" is a gross mischaracterization.

Second, finding a major flaw in science is not accepted as a "breakthrough" often; new ideas that challenge old orders are met with considerable skepticism to s

In my philosophy of science course, on the other hand, I was taught by a world-renowned professor (Paul Feyerabend) that there is no such thing as scientific method and that physicists have no better claim to knowledge than voodoo priests

I'd say he's a bit of a silly goose who needs to study the things he is dismantling before making claims against them.

Actually unlike most philosophers of science Feyerabend did very extensive historical studies showing that the nicely streamlined philosophical schemes of how the scientific process was supposed to work did not actually occur in reality and that the rules of "scientific method" were broken at every turn even for those scientific discoveries that are always held up as the shining examples of the scientific method at work. What he showed was that if scientists had adhered to this philosophical fiction (pleonasm) of a scientific method many of the great discoveries and revolutions in science would not have taken place. The two deepest conclusions from Feyerabends work are:

1. That you can't let philosophers legislate for science because they will end up destroying it.and

2. That science, since it has no real epistemological foundation is no more justified in claiming to be discovering objective truth than, say, a voodoo priest and that therefore the authority of science should only be accepted in as far as it improves our quality of life.

Feyerabend was in fact a pretty subtle philosopher but because of a combination of irreverence towards the great names and myths of science (mainly Popper and The Scientific Method), a polemic style of writing, a deeply humanistic view of the world and it's affairs and the fact that he was attacking the philosopher's misguided dreams of an epistemological foundation of science he has been consistently misread by whole generations of scientists and philosophers. In my book he is one of the great philosophers of the 20th century and one of the great humanist thinkers in the history of philosophy. Coincidentally almost everyone I have read on Feyerabend seems to completely miss the point that he was in essence a humanist thinker who's main aim was protecting humans against totalitarian, authoritarian and absolutist claims of science and scientific progress.

So, with the publication of Logical Leap, has the age-old "problem of induction" now been solved?

Either science is justified or it isn't. Either an epistemological foundation is required for justification, or it isn't. Don't switch to an empirical observation model when you've just argued that epistemological form is the essential criterion.

That something is justified doesn't mean it's necessarily justified. Most things are in fact justified only within specific contexts.

Feyerabend's argument is that the fact that science has enabled us to think about and interact with the world in ways we enjoy or find useful in no way validates claims that science leads to objective truth and in fact no such claim can be substantiated because the "scientific method" can be historically refuted and satisfactory epistemological justifications simply do not exist (well you can try to come up with one but I wouldn't advise that undertaking, it has been shown to be historically most unfruitful).

In the absence of an absolute justification Science is contextually justified by the fact that we find it enjoyable, interesting, useful, inspiring, that it gives us useful ways to interact with the world, that it enhances our understanding of processes in that world etc. If the products or process of science do not provide those incentives you cannot argue it should be accepted anyway because it's "objectively true".

You simply take the claims about what defines "scientific method" and the examples used to illustrate that claim and show that the reality did in fact not conform to those definitions and that the claimed successes of that method were in fact made possible only by violating the terms of that definition.You are, I think, confusing the scientific method as used by what we tend to call scientists with the definitions of the "scientific method" and idealized examples used by philosophers of science.

And who says considerations of quality of life are objective? Feyerabend's thinking on quality of life is based loosely on the work of John Stuart Mill's which addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. If science threatens that liberty by making totalitarian claims (i.e. science is absolutely justified because it has a method and/or epistemological foundation that leads to objective truth) they should be resisted because no such claim has

Just because you or others here don't care about certain questions that some philosophers deal with doesn't mean they are not important. It's sad to witness how putting down philosophy has become the norm.

The problem is, they don't seem to be of any practical importance whatsoever.

High-level English or art degrees may make it difficult to find a job, but everyone recognizes their usefulness -- you're creating something beautiful, or you're communicating better, or helping others to communicate. Even by themselves, everyone can appreciate what authors and painters do, and there's always advertising. Or combine it with any other field -- an effective communicator is valuable pretty much anywhere.

Just because some scientists tend to bleat crude things about philosophy hardly means that it's some sort of an intellectual backwater. The truth is that a lot of scientists know next to nothing about philosophy of science, and thus denigrate that which they do not understand.

I think one could also say that most philosophers do not have a working knowledge of the science from the last 100 years. I don't think it is an accident that a great deal of the most famous philosophers came from the mechanistic era before relativity and quantum mechanics.

While the greek word philosophia literally means "friend of wisdom", the common-day philosopher tends to stare at their naval and wonder if they even exist more than they use anything which might resemble wisdom.

Meanwhile, the engineer is creating ways to save lives, feed millions, and travel to Mars.

I - personally - find it frustrating that we listen to the naval-staring philosopher, and forget what wisdom is in the same moment.

Not all philosophers are that paralyzed, and I think that it is a useful profession. It's just that supply vastly exceeds demand.

There are a great many people who like to stare at big boats with guns, and philosophize about how they should be used. And we'd all do well to pay even less attention to most of those people than we do to the ones who are fascinated with their oranges.

While the greek word philosophia literally means "friend of wisdom", the common-day philosopher tends to stare at their naval and wonder if they even exist

Which "common day" philosophers are you referring to? How much common day philosophy have you read? I think it's fair to say that this problem is near death and has been for a long time. The problem was made famous by Descartes of course, but he's hardly "common day."

I - personally - find it frustrating that we listen to the naval-staring philosopher, and forget what wisdom is in the same moment.

I'm happy to hear that you think people listen to philosophers. How many people do you know that spend their time worry about the problem of existence instead of something else?

Your attitude about philosophers is common, people take an intro to philosophy course that focuses on rationalist thought of the 15th century and assume they now know the state-of-the-art of philosophy. Somehow people don't realize how stupid this is, even though they wouldn't dare assume they understood contemporary physics after taking physics 101. Philosophy has a very long history of contributing to major scientific breakthroughs. Here are a few:

1. Einstein, throughout his life, credited many philosophers including Hume and Kant with inspiring him to come up with special and general relativity.

2. Neils Bohr invented his preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics because we was inspired by Kant.

3. Adam Smith was a "moral philosopher." Before him economics didn't exist.

4. Psychology wasn't it's own discipline until very recently. Before that it was philosophy.

Failure to recognize how much you don't know is forgetting what wisdom is. Epistemology, philosophy, is the study of what wisdom is, and yet you claim that ignorance of those is wisdom. Your argument presupposes that there are millions of lives to save or feed, that there is a Mars. Are you wrong? No, but ignorance of the reasons of why your assumptions might be false doesn't make you right.

If anything, philosophy and the natural sciences should be brought closer together because they have so much to offer

This post is spot on. All the rest of the comments on here, including the submitter, is banter. I doubt the submitter understands his professor's jest with the scientific method...and you can see why a professor would jest based on the comments. What wouldn't be more entertaining than watching people attempt to prove that science discovers reality and develops absolute universal knowledge?

It is interesting how Socrates is not brought up in this argument..at least that I have read yet. But you are spot on

That's just envy. If you work in a field that in centuries didn't come up with anything better than "I think therefore I am" (somehow obvious, isn't it?) then to beef about other peoples success seems to be a common retreat...

The first chapter presents the philosophical foundations of the theory, which builds directly on the theory of concepts developed by Ayn Rand. Unfortunately for the general reader, Harriman assumes familiarity with Rand's theory of knowledge, including her views of concepts as open-ended, knowledge as hierarchical, certainty as contextual, perceptions as self-evident, and arbitrary ideas as invalid. Those unfamiliar with these ideas may find this section to be confusing.

"Ayn Rand" and "philosophical foundations" should not be in the same sentence. If you like something Ayn Rand says, then I guarantee you can find another philosopher said it only in a far more intellectually rigorous manner.

Ya I've never got all the Randroids out there. I'd never heard of Ayn Rand as a kid. Maybe in passing but never paid any attention, never read any of her work or anything. I was always interested in philosophy though and read a fair bit myself. In university, I took quite a few philosophy courses, and got taught on all the major philosophers and so on. Then, having heard some people going on about Ayn Rand I decided to investigate a bit. I read some of her philosophy and said "How is this news? It is all shit I've heard before, but better, with less logical problems, and less crazy."

As far as I can tell people who get obsessed with Rand as a genius are just people who have never read Karl Popper.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. -- Kung Fu Monkey

I think the obsession with Rand is the scope of her philosophy, and the fact that she wrote fiction which made it more accessible to younger readers. I think Rand could have been a very positive influence in getting young people to think critically and question a great deal about what their governments and religions are telling them, but her personality and the Ayn Rand institute caused a very serious stigma around Objectivism.

I'm a Philosophy student and I think I can speak with a certain degree of authority when I say that Ayn Rand isn't someone you seriously cite in academic philosophy. She just isn't credible - and I'm not talking in terms of political disagreement - her arguments on topics of philosophical import just aren't very good. I wasn't too happy with everything that was written before for Rand, such as your rather shallow evaluation of Feyerabend and your flippant remarks about epistemology which clearly demonstrat

I'm a Philosophy student and I think I can speak with a certain degree of authority when I say that Ayn Rand isn't someone you seriously cite in academic philosophy. She just isn't credible - and I'm not talking in terms of political disagreement - her arguments on topics of philosophical import just aren't very good. I wasn't too happy with everything that was written before for Rand, such as your rather shallow evaluation of Feyerabend and your flippant remarks about epistemology which clearly demonstrate you have no idea what your are talking about, but second I hit "Ayn Rand" I just stopped reading.

From Paul Krugman:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

A funny quote but rather unfair. Come to think of it, I did read Atlas Shrugged at around that age, and it did change my life, though (thankfully) not in the way Krugman describes.

To me, it was interesting to read someone who, for example, put man's ability before man's need. Rand's (political) views were not exactly new to me, and I was already leaning towards a more right-wing, libertarian (insert your favorite label) world view, but to a boy growing up in the Dutch educational system, actually seeing such views promoted in print was a rare sight and a first for me. I've since left Rand's somewhat simple notions behind, but she did get me reading other works on politics and philosophy.

Something similar did happen to me. My first real experience with reading philosophy (used loosely) was Rand's oeuvre in high school. In undergrad, I moved on to Locke, Rousseau, Hart, and others (obviously I was interested in jurisprudence as a hobby). But Rand was my first. I never thought about writers expressing philosophy through narrative until then, and it had a great effect on the way I myself write.

Says the guy who has gotten absolutely everything wrong about the economy.

Yeah, everything except predicting that complex derivatives markets would lead to a subprime collapse and that allowing banks to use our deposits to fund speculation would cause a housing crisis to take down the rest of the economy, which is exactly what happened in 2007-8. Aside from that, he got everything wrong. Also, explaining why countries export the same commodities to one another rather than fully specializing. Man, that dumbass was so wrong, because, of course, Japanese never buy Fords and Americans never buy Toyotas, and Europeans never buy Dodges, and Americans never buy Volkswagens.

Seriously, his only solution is "spend more", like a bloodletter of old claiming that he could have healed his patient if only the family had let him drain just one more drop of "bad humor" from his system.

I might buy that if you could show one shred of empirical evidence that spending in time of recession hurts the economy.

While I think Ayn Rand is a third-rate hack in everything she did, I will say that I had a philosophy professor in college, who was very much a serious academic, who I found out later did write scholarly treatises on Rand.

If you like something Ayn Rand says, then I guarantee you can find another philosopher said it only in a far more intellectually rigorous manner.

Yeah, mostly Locke, Aristotle and--remarkably given her hostility toward the man and his work--Kant.

People interested in Rand's notion of concepts are well-advised to look at the work of Peter Abelard, too. Although he's famous for other reasons, his conceptualist "third way" between nominalism and idealism is actually viable, and quite close to what Rand was dreaming of.

From the sounds of this book it's nothing but a collection of just-so stories about the history of physics (Hey look, I'm writing a review of a review!) Science is a lot bigger than physics, and physics has a large number of special features that most sciences--biology, geology, astronomy, etc--don't have. As such, it's a lousy place to start when talking about science as such.

The critical piece that's missing from all discussions of induction I'm aware is the creative role of definition. Newton, for example, created definitions of mass, force, etc, such that he could build a consistent, albeit incomplete, mathematical description of phenomena. The concepts he created were not given: they are as much a product of the needs of the knowing subject as they are constrained by the facts. Constrained: not determined.

Unfortunately, philosophers are (still!) innumerate, and as such are not able to grasp the notion of a constraint: they think there must be either just one right way to conceptualize reality (idealism), or that any old way will do (nominalism).

Rand claimed on the one hand to reject these alternatives, but then argued strongly that there was exactly one correct way because "reality really is that way", which is obviously nonsense: even within physics there are frequently several equally correct ways of conceptualizing the same phenomena (Newtonian vs classical physics, for example, which give quite different accounts of the cause of motion, one based on force, one based on the principle of least action or similar.)

Rand claimed on the one hand to reject these alternatives, but then argued strongly that there was exactly one correct way because "reality really is that way", which is obviously nonsense: even within physics there are frequently several equally correct ways of conceptualizing the same phenomena (Newtonian vs classical physics, for example, which give quite different accounts of the cause of motion, one based on force, one based on the principle of least action or similar.)

If Rand was so good at evaluating theories for arbitrariness and fitness, then how could she ever have promoted something as unrealistic as leaving the fate of humanity to laissez-faire capitalism? Had she never met humans before?

Most people espousing randian "no-holds-barred" capitalism seem to do so out of a general nihilism towards people ever working for anyone but themselves. That is, they seem to think people are egotistic and amoral, and any attempt at socialism in any form resulting in either oppression or parasitic stagnation or both. They don't seem evil as such, but it is a strange view, and I cannot wrap my head around it fully.

But I guess my central point is that objectivism (which includes the laissez-faire botch) is at odds with her other big meme, enlightened self-interest, which requires doing good unto others and expecting it to benefit you.

Laissez-faire is a license to defraud. Human lives are finite, and the ability of a laissez-faire system to return one's evils back to oneself in time for them to overwhelm one's ill-gotten wealth is, evidently, minimal. If the system had a shorter feedback loop, or we lived long enough to be brought low by the results from this system, then laissez-faire would result in a competitive balance (albeit a tense one).

Given the subject of this book, and how Rand is the basis for much of it, you'd think she'd have understood that believing in laissez-faire was, if not arbitrary, then certainly not supported by the evidence. It's certainly true that all the evidence today points to the fact that loosening the brakes on wealth-accumulation is resulting in more pain for the human race overall and less for those who already got theirs. She even had a word for the sort of selfishness that dominates laissez-faire: "unenlightened self-interst". Blows my mind that she cocked it up that bad and promoted objectivism instead of pointing flashing neon arrows at it and saying "DON'T DO THIS".

Time to put the "enlightened self-interest" politics to work, and make sure people can distinguish them from the "unenlightened self-interest" practices that politics has been swinging towards for the past 30 years.

I am not familiar with the specifics of Rand's works, I can see a problem here: trying to determine what constitutes "enlightened self interest" is in any case key. If we factor out shortsightedness, most people probably wouldn't be able to compete in todays society if they had to take full economic responsibility for themselves. No, it's clear that they can't. And then people spit on them and call them "white trash". Another problem is fundamentally, am I not expected to act morally unless it is in my self

they do not honestly consider it to be in their enlightened self-interest to contribute to the poor, caring not for societial mores or others suffering. They are strange people, but they exist by their own right.

No, they exist because someone created an unfree market by getting rid of the guillotine. In the old days, they had fun for awhile until it was off with their heads. They didn't breed too successfully. The libertarian solution would be to allow the guillotine thus periodically cleansing the population of sociopaths.

Also I don't think it terribly enlightened to position yourself as the wealthy well fed dude with lots of food, surrounded by starving poor. That strikes me as fairly stupid. For example, I

...let's say that I'm a selfless person who hate to see others suffer, and manage to convince enough people of my position to implement a heavily taxed socialistic system in the society in which i live, raising general welfare on the expense of the successful, some of which truly detest this.... Who's "enlightened self interest" takes predecence? The strongest?

"Enlightened self-interest" is entirely a matter of how one chooses one's own actions. As such, one's own self-interest always takes precedence. As to whose self-interest wins out, that would obviously be the strongest: by definition, the strongest individual or group is the one most able to impose its own preferences on the world around it.

Thus, "enlightened self interest" is just "moral relativism" in disguise? Or it assumes moral relativism?

It is not "moral relativism" for the simple reason that it has nothing to do with morality in the first place. Enlightened self-interest is an argument in favor of actin

But can't you see that justified self-defense and the Non-Aggression Principle is a moral stance, if a very bare-bones one? I also think "most people" can't live in a society sidestepping morality, and will try to enforce their views of good and evil on others given the chance. I can see it as an attempt to create a "core" morality framework or axis for society and government that fits everyone, but I still think that it is lacking in content. It basically seems like taking the core principles of most every

you'd think she'd have understood that believing in laissez-faire was, if not arbitrary, then certainly not supported by the evidence. It's certainly true that all the evidence today points to the fact that loosening the brakes on wealth-accumulation is resulting in more pain for the human race overall and less for those who already got theirs.

I think Ayn Rand's problem is as simple as this: she had a bad experience living under Russian Communism, escaped to America, and jumped to the (false) conclusion that since the Bolsheviks' ideology had demonstrably bad effects, then the exact logical opposite of it must have good effects. She retained a harsh Marxist-Stalinist materialist-dialectical view of the world, just flipped the polarity from 'all should serve the State and sacrifice personal advancement' to 'all should serve their selfish interests and sacrifice love and compassion'. She felt that Marxism must be 100% wrong and therefore anti-Marxism would be 100% right. So her view of a healthy human life became so distorted as to literally argue that the best form of love is rape. (That scene is when I stopped reading 'The Fountainhead').

But the opposite of a partial falsehood is not a truth, and Marxism isn't 100% wrong. It isn't wrong to be altruistic, it isn't wrong to be part of a group, it isn't wrong to share one's life with another. Humans are social creatures and our very selfhood allows overlap with others. Egoistic isolation and perpetual competition isn't our natural state - we go crazy in solitary confinement.

What's wrong is to abuse others and ignore their talents, either for personal gain or for group conformity. Reality is about 90 degrees rotated from the left-right axis that Marx and Rand take.

Your rant on lassez-faire can only be achieved by ignoring the fact that laissez-faire is derived from property rights. Property rights take priority, and if you see abuses coming out of laissez-faire, it's because property rights are being violated. Laissez-faire is mainly useful as a guideline for pointing out the damage caused by excessive government, it is not a full philosophical statement of the proper extent of government because it is not fundamental enough. For similar reasons, Rand vehemently re

Don't know why, but I seem sometimes to have pre-publication access to/. articles. I read the entire article, parts of it twice, and looked up some Rand stuff online before posting. My Karma must be overflowing the buffer or something.

This sounds like a case of being able to prove anything, as long as your assumptions (you know, those unshakeable things every toddler knows) are in line with the things you'd like to prove. For Ayn Rand certain things were quite basic. I mean, for the ones who are on top in any given society, that society is "natural" or "divine". Those on the bottom may not subscribe to that philosophy.

As for induction, it's a pretty well understood concept in mathematics and in general use in computer science. I always c

I think the role of the philosopher is to question everything. Sometimes it's a rigorous questioning (because, you know, physicists are philosophers too). Other times it's more of a general questioning, less scientific and more...well...philosophical. Philosophical statements should all begin with something like "What if..." or "Suppose that..." or "I've been wondering..."

Philosophy is not about fact. Don't say that modern science is no better than island superstitions. There's lots of philosophical qu

When you get "I was taught by a world-renowned professor (Paul Feyerabend) that there is no such thing as scientific method and that physicists have no better claim to knowledge than voodoo priests", then Sokal is perfectly cromulent.

The only litmus test for scientific method left nowadays is if you pass the review of your peers, that is couple of your colleagues from the same grant hunting boat.

That's nonsense. Peer review is not about proving something is correct, and no scientist interprets it that way. Peer review is primarily about checking that your papers are clearly written and describe your work well enough that other people can understand what you did. It also has a secondary function of helping journals pick the articles their readers are most likely to be interested in (and down the road, most likely to cite). The real test of your work is in other scientists' response to it. And that can take a long time to sort out - years or even decades. Science works slowly, but so what? Speed isn't the goal. The goal is to work out the right answer, however long that takes.

Ayn Rand was an intelligent fruitcake, not a philosopher or a scientist. The basis of her ideas can be found in the sources quoted in Umberto Eco's The search for the perfect language, which is quite hard going but I think worth the effort.

Ayn Rand's concept of the arbitrary has its origins in the medieval ideas of substance and accident - the properties that define what something is versus things that don't (you wouldn't separate men into those with, and those without, spots on their bum and expect to deduce any real insights.)

So: sounds like rehashed old stuff from the mob who want to argue that there is no "physical reality".

finally, how modern physics has gone down the wrong path due to the lack of a proper theory of induction.

I await a better one with interest; the present one has been under investigation for hundreds of years, and the root problem remains the initially unprovable hypothesis (which will eventually be found to be . It doesn't go away with hand waving.

Incidentally, the Whipple Museum at Cambridge is stuffed with unreadable and largely unread books on induction in the philosophy of science. It tends to be a career graveyard subject: scientists are too busy to care, philosophers of science just categorise them by principal fallacies.

I await a better one with interest; the present one has been under investigation for hundreds of years, and the root problem remains the initially unprovable hypothesis (which will eventually be found to be.

The most interesting recent take on induction that I've seen is Quentin Meillassoux's in After Finitude. Meillassoux argues that the problem of induction as usually stated has it backwards. In fact, according to Meillassoux, the reason we cannot prove that nature is uniform is because nature isn't uniform, but instead totally arbitrary, and (this is the bizarre part), it is only because nature is totally arbitrary that scientific knowledge is possible.

People like the articles' author seem to forget that "science" covers a lot of territory, and it is done by scientists - who are humans, with all the flaws and variation and abilities of humans.
If you look at the diverse array of activities and people who do science, it is hard to believe that any single "theory" will accomodate all that

I have an inherent distrust of anyone that is basing inductive logic on the underpinnings of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, for the simple reason that I've never . . . *ever* . . . heard of Objectivism as being contributory to *any* philosophy of logic.

Quite the opposite in fact, I've seen logicians use her as examples of how people can be fooled by pseudo-logic which hides implicit assumptions under carefully concealed vagueness and frame shifting.

This smells more like an attempt to rehabilitate Ayn Rand as a genuine philosophical contribution than a book on logic.

All the so-called great philosophy questions can be answered definitively if you allow for the terms to be properly defined. The profession of the philosopher is to refuse adequate definition to these questions, so that they are unanswerable by design; their work is no better or more useful than religions assertions.

It does deal with "how confident are we that ______ can be used as a reliable model of reality?" On which point we have Bayes' Theorem and various less-than-precise fuzzy analogues such as the rubric we call "the scientific method."

So for those philosophers who worry about some sort of Ultimate Certainty Regarding Truth, I sometimes play the game but am not, in the end, worrying about whether it is Really True that my hands are typing on black keys with white lettering right now -- which is about the level you have to go to before "witch doctor truth" gets competitive with "quantum physics truth" for my attention.

"first-level" generalizations which are directly, perceptually obvious, such as the toddler's grasp of the fact that "pushed balls roll."

Why is this a fundamental level? Isn't the observed situation a special case (particular ball, surface, pusher and so on) from which the toddler might use induction to conclude that all pushed balls roll?

The problem with books like this -- even by physicists -- is that they all too rarely study the right things physicists have done. Induction/inference in epistemology is put on a mathematically sound axiom-based foundation by Richard Cox and E. T. Jaynes. The former wrote a truly marvellous monograph entitled "The Algebra of Probable Inference" (readily available on Amazon). E. T. Jaynes arrived at a very similar result following instead from Shannon's Information Theory (which is a consequence of Cox's prior work, although this is not generally recognized) and later enthusiastically adopted Cox's axioms as the basis for his own opus major "Probability Theory, the Logic of Science". Both are available as a twofer on Amazon (or even as part of a threefer with Sivia's work on Bayesian Analysis).

They have one enormous redeeming value -- they don't refer to any work on philosophy including any by Ayn Rand. These are serious works on mathematics, logic, probability theory, and science, and they contain algebra, not handwaving. Absolutely amazing algebra, by the way. The sum total of philosophy in Cox is his highly restrained observation that his work seems to have solved Hume's basic problem -- deriving the theory of inference so it is on a sound mathematical footing.

Two other places where this general topic is reviewed: David Mackay's superb: "Information Theory, Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks" where he explores the consequences of Shannon's Theorem in cryptography and data compression and reliable storage, then moves on to argue quite persuasively that the human brain and neural networks in general function as a Bayesian inference engine; and my own book-in-writing "Axioms".

I've noticed that the biggest idiots out there are also the ones who resort to "Philosophy of Science" BS. When someone who claims scientific credentials starts citing a philosopher, they have immediately moved into the realm of crank-dom. That includes Penrose's every time he stops backing up his opinion with the math. And Hoyle who wasn't even very good at math, and this coming from someone with just a Bachelor's degree.

I can imagine people like Einstein and Hawking standing around blowing flecks of spittle in each others' faces arguing, and like one Anon. commenter said, "hands slapping the walls" and just being total fucking retards until they pick this specific book up. Ahhhhhh! Scientists don't hafta be reeeeTARDIIIIIIIDD any MOOOOOOOOORE

1. Please be more PC wrt "total fucking retards". "total fucking asswipes" is a much more acceptable phrase

2. Please reference Monty Python's coverage of Greece vs Germany at the 1972 Olympics in the sport of Philosopher's Football

Voodoo priests and priests of other stripes performed the modern role of physicists when we first climbed down from the trees. The modern scientific method evolved from the religions of the past.

Just...no. You are trolling, joking, or have been deluded (perhaps diluted to, depending on your IQ concentration). The modern scientific method evolved by breaking away from religions of the past, choosing to investigate rather than just take things at face value. I think you will find religion consistantly changing their outlook towards the universe as science progresses, and not the other way around. When was the last time a religious breakthrough shaped science? Perhaps you were referring to the dark-ag